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NYT: Why Women Did Not Unite to Vote Against Donald Trump

By Claire Cain Miller

Women were predicted to come out in force to vote for the first female president and against a man who demeaned them and bragged about sexual assault.

Instead, they voted more or less as they always have: along party lines.

The share of women who voted for Donald J. Trump and who didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton was, if you look at past data, not all that surprising. For years, political science has shown that party outweighs gender when it comes to voting. This election, despite all the gender ferment, turned out to be little different.

If anything, a small percentage of men who would ordinarily vote Democratic seem to have voted Republican, according to exit polls, which are generally good at capturing gender breakdown of the electorate.

The gender gap — the difference in the share of men and women who vote for a candidate — was 11 percentage points for Mr. Trump (53-42), similar to the gender gap for Bill Clinton in 1996 and Barack Obama in 2012, and in line with the gender breakdown of Republican voters.

Fifty-four percent of Mrs. Clinton’s voters were women, and 42 percent of Mr. Trump’s, an overall change of only one percentage point in Mrs. Clinton’s favor compared with 2012. Forty-one percent of her voters and 53 percent of Mr. Trump’s were men, an overall change of five percentage points in his favor.

Typically, at least 90 percent of voters in each party vote for that party’s candidate, according to Kathleen Dolan, professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, who studies women in politics.

Of Republican women, that appears to have happened for Mr. Trump. Fifty-three percent of white women voted for him, just as the majority of white women have voted Republican in recent elections. The only potential aberration is that only 87 percent of Democratic white men voted for Mrs. Clinton, slightly less than would be expected, Ms. Dolan said. There could be various reasons for that, and she said we did not yet know how significant it was.

The results show how deep party affiliation runs, even in the most atypical of elections, when gender played a bigger role than usual in the campaigns.

“We know this, yet we have this expectation from living in the world that sex really matters,” Ms. Dolan said. “It does not change things at all. What matters 99.9 percent of the time is their political party.”

In her research, she asked voters during congressional and governors’ elections in 2010 and 2014 about male and female candidates in general, and found that they held gender stereotypes about their strengths and weaknesses, like women excelling at health policy and men at crime policy. Two months later, she interviewed the same voters, this time using the names of the male and female candidates running. Gender stereotypes evaporated, and people chose candidates based on party, not gender.

Other research has come to similar conclusions.

There is very little evidence that women vote for women because of their sex, Ms. Dolan said. The reason it can seem that female voters are voting for female candidates is that both are more likely to be Democrats, so they’re actually voting along party lines.

Continue reading at The New York Times.

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Free Beacon: Abedin New Focus of Clinton Email Investigation

FBI report reveals she forwarded classified data to her private email

By Bill Gertz

Documents made public from the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private server provide clues about the current review of more than half a million emails linked to Clinton presidential campaign vice chair Huma Abedin.

Abedin was questioned by FBI agents and Justice Department officials, including those involved with counterintelligence matters, on April 5.

During those discussions, Abedin revealed that she used four different email accounts while she was deputy chief of staff for operations in Clinton’s seventh floor office at the State Department.

The email accounts included her official State Department account, abedinh@state.gov, the private server account, huma@clintonemail.com, and her private email, humamabedin@yahoo.com. Abedin’s fourth email account was associated with the campaign activities of her estranged husband, former Democratic congressman Anthony Weiner.

The FBI reopened its Clinton email investigation after agents recovered a laptop computer from Wiener that reportedly contains some 650,000 emails now being reviewed by FBI agents.  Weiner’s laptop was obtained during an investigation into allegations the former congressman exchanged illicit messages with a 15-year-old girl.

The FBI began reviewing the emails after receiving a search warrant on Monday.

FBI Director James Comey revealed to Congress last week that he ordered the email investigation to be reopened after “pertinent” information was uncovered in the separate investigation of Weiner.

The Wall Street Journal, quoting people close to the FBI and Justice Department, reported last weekend that FBI and Justice Department officials disagreed with the decision to renew the email probe.

Word of the FBI’s renewed email investigation was a political bombshell for Clinton, coming 11 days before Election Day and again raising questions about her character.

Clinton and her campaign spokespeople have called for the FBI to release further details about the new email cache.

On Monday, Assistant Attorney General Peter J. Kadzik wrote to congressional Democrats who sought additional details of the new probe. “We assure you that the Department will continue to work closely with the FBI and together, dedicate all necessary resources and take appropriate steps as expeditiously as possible,” Kadzik stated in a three-paragraph letter.

Abedin’s lawyer, Karen Dunn, said in a statement on Monday that Abedin was unaware that her emails were on Weiner’s laptop. “Ms. Abedin will continue to be, as she always has been, forthcoming and cooperative,” she said.

The original FBI investigation was prompted by the discovery of secret intelligence information in Clinton’s emails. The probe, thought to have been finished in July, seeks to find out how classified information was placed on the unsecure server and whether foreign intelligence services or other hackers were able to steal it through cyber intrusions.

The classified information included some of the most sensitive secrets kept in what are called Special Access Programs, including information on how drone strikes are conducted.

Abedin told agents she was not aware of any attempts to hack her email accounts, according to the FBI report of her interview.

“Abedin recalled that some people at DoS had issues with their Gmail accounts but she never had a Gmail account,” the report said.

While working for Clinton, Abedin held a top-secret security clearance. She had a classified computer system, along with a separate unclassified computer, at her desk in Clinton’s office.

“Abedin could access her clintonemail.com account and her Yahoo account via the internet on the unclassified [Department of State] computer system,” the FBI report states.

Abedin told the FBI that printing difficulties on the State Department network led her to routinely forward emails to her non-State Department accounts for printing.

During questioning by the FBI, Abedin was shown several emails that revealed lines of inquiry being pursued by investigators.

For example, one email with the subject line “Fwd: U.S. interest in Pak Paper 10-04” appeared to contain a classified document that was forwarded by Abedin to her personal Yahoo account in October 2009. The document had come from an aide to Richard Holbrooke, who was special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan at the time.

“Abedin was unaware of the classification of the document and stated that she did not make judgments on the classification of material that she received,” the report states, adding that she relied on senders to properly mark and transmit sensitive material.

Another email chain dated August 16, 2010 shown to Abedin contained the subject line, “Re: your yahoo acct.” It appeared to warn Abedin that her Yahoo account had been hacked.

“Abedin did not recall the email and provided that despite the content of the email she was not sure that her email account had ever been compromised,” the report said.

Another email from October 2009 shown to Abedin involved communications security procedures for use during travel in Moscow. Abedin told investigators the email contained instructions to be followed by Clinton and “all the traveling team.”

“Abedin stated that they used computers that were set up and controlled by the Mobile Communications Team to access their DoS and personal email accounts when they were in Russia,” the report said.

The questioning indicates investigators were trying to determine if Russian intelligence may have compromised the emails and cell phones of Clinton and her team of aides during a visit to Russia.

Another email involved Clinton requesting that Abedin schedule a conference call with Jacob Sullivan, a senior State Department official. The message discussed whether the call should be conducted on secure lines or unclassified telephone.

The email contained classified information that was redacted from public release involving Sullivan’s meeting with Hamid bin Jassim, the former prime minister of Qatar.

Abedin said she could not recall the email exchange or the context but noted that generally she would be told by Clinton whether conference calls should be held on secure lines or not. Abedin said it would be unusual for her to read the content and decide whether the call should be secure or unclassified.

Another email shown to Abedin appeared to indicate that the private email server had been hacked.

According to the FBI report, Abedin told investigators she “lost most of her old emails” when the clintonemail.com server was transitioned to a post-State Department server with the address hrcoffice.com.

“Abdein did not know if the system administrator had archived the mailboxes before the system was taken down,” the report said.

Abedin’s claim that she lost most of her emails during the server transition will likely be checked in the FBI review of the new emails found on the Weiner laptop.

The renewed FBI investigation also may be able to resolve questions about missing boxes of emails that disappeared between the time Clinton turned them over to lawyers for review and the time they were ultimately delivered to the State Department.

An identified State Department witness told the FBI that 14 boxes of emails were supplied to Clinton’s lawyers at Williams & Connelly for review prior to being turned over to the State Department. Only 12 boxes were retrieved in December 2015.

Continue reading at the Washington Free Beacon.

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CNN: Justice Department, Abedin lawyers in talks to permit email search

Hillary & Huma Email perjury

By Evan Perez, Justice Department Correspondent

(CNN) The Justice Department and the FBI are in discussions with lawyers for Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin to secure approval that would allow the FBI to conduct a full search of her newly discovered emails, sources familiar with the discussions told CNN.

Authorities have not yet sought a search warrant for the emails, law enforcement sources told CNN. Government lawyers hope to secure a search warrant to permit investigators to review thousands of emails on a computer Abedin shared with her estranged husband, Anthony Weiner, officials said.

The new search warrant is needed because the existing authorization, covered by a subpoena, related only to the ongoing investigation of Weiner, who is accused of having sexually explicit communications with an underage girl.

Investigators from the FBI’s New York field office who are conducting the Weiner investigation stumbled on the Abedin emails while they were reviewing emails and other communications on the computer, which was considered to belong to Weiner, the officials said. They stopped their work and called in the team of investigators from FBI headquarters who conducted the probe of Clinton’s private email server.

Abedin’s lawyers didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The investigators saw enough of the emails to determine that they appeared pertinent to the previously completed investigation and that they may be emails not previously reviewed.

Because they don’t have a warrant specific to Abedin’s emails, officials have not been able to further examine them. Justice Department and FBI officials view Abedin as cooperative with the investigation.

Continue reading at CNN.

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Project Veritas: Rigging the Election – Video III: Creamer Confirms Hillary Clinton Involvement

From our friend James O’Keefe

Project Veritas Action has released the third video in a multi-part series that is sending shockwaves through the DNC and the Clinton campaign. The first video explained the dark secrets and the hidden connections and organizations the Clinton campaign uses to incite violence at Trump rallies. The second video exposed a diabolical step-by-step voter fraud strategy discussed by top Democratic operatives and showed one key operative admitting that the Democrats have been rigging elections for fifty years. This latest video takes this investigation even further.

Part III of the undercover investigation dives further into the back room dealings of Democratic politics.  It exposes prohibited communications between Hillary Clinton’s campaign, the DNC and the non-profit organization Americans United for Change.  And, it’s all disguised as a duck.

Several Project Veritas Action undercover journalists catch Democracy Partners founder directly implicating Hillary Clinton in FEC violations.

“In the end, it was the candidate, Hillary Clinton, the future president of the United States, who wanted ducks on the ground,” says Creamer in one of several exchanges. “So, by God, we would get ducks on the ground.”

It is made clear that high-level DNC operative Creamer realized that this direct coordination between Democracy Partners and the campaign would be damning when he said: “Don’t repeat that to anybody.”

It was earlier this year when people wearing Donald Duck costumes started showing up at Donald Trump events all over the country. Brad Woodhouse is the president of Americans United for Change (AUFC) and he worked with Robert Creamer, Scott Foval, and DNC Rapid Response Coordinator Aaron Black to launch their “Donald Ducks” campaign.

After the first video in this series, Woodhouse fired Scott Foval, his national field director.

In the video, the operatives go on to explain their plot.

“Let me tell you something. I think she [Hillary Clinton] has the right instinct on this. This thing is resonating, but that story is not exactly what you want to hear about how presidential decision-making happened,” said Woodhouse.

However, the originator of the Donald Ducks scheme was supposed to remain secret.

Robert Creamer goes on to add, “I was actually on a plane to go to London last week — Christina Reynolds [Deputy Communications Director for Hillary for America] calls saying, ‘I have good news and bad news. The good news is the candidate would like to have a mascot following around the duck — I mean, Trump.’”

Creamer then says, “If the future president wants ducks, we will put ducks on the ground.”

Hillary Clinton and the DNC wanted the Donald Ducks agitators at Trump and Pence campaign events. The direct involvement of the campaign and the Democratic National Committee with Americans United for Change and activists wearing Donald Duck costumes smacks strongly of illegal coordinated campaign expenditures.

Federal campaign law experts have told us “the ducks on the ground are likely public communications for purposes of the law.  It’s political activity opposing Trump, paid for by Americans United for Change funds but controlled by Clinton and her campaign.”

Representatives of Clinton’s campaign were on daily conference calls which PVA journalists witnessed with Creamer, AUFC managers and their operatives.  They were talking about where to send the duck and the “ducks message.”  Not only was the campaign in on it, but apparently Donna Brazille’s Democratic National Committee was in on it as well.

Continue reading at Project Veritas Action Fund.

 

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Daily Caller: ‘HOLIER-THAN-THOU FREAK OUT’ — Scarborough Tears Into Media’s Debate Coverage

Joe Scarborough blasted the media for its hypocritical debate coverage during Thursday’s broadcast of “Morning Joe” on MSNBC.

By Christian Datoc

“This is just an example of the media finding something they can absolutely freak out about,” Scarborough said of Trump’s waviness on accepting the election results, should he lose. “It’s just another example of the media having to find a little phrase and freak out.”

“As a Republican, I have listened to Democrats talking about the only two times we won the White House in like 800 years, we stole both elections,” he continued. “I had to sit through Fahrenheit 911, and a lady sobbing violently behind me on the Upper West Side about the election being stolen for George Bush.”

Continue reading, The Daily Caller.

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